In sales, extra steps get in the way. Anything that prolongs the sales cycle or causes the experience to be less than efficient is another opportunity for your prospect to reconsider. And when prospects reconsider, nobody wins.
Enter e-signature solutions for Salesforce like S-Sign by S-Docs, the best friend of quickly closed deals. E-signatures remove one of the most common bottlenecks that salespeople face: slow signature processes at the closing phase of a deal. Electronic signatures are easier for everyone involved and incredibly secure, and they ensure your momentum doesn’t stall. So if your current signature workflow looks something like this:
Read on for the top 10 ways e-signature solutions for Salesforce can help you close more deals faster, and dramatically cut down on the unnecessary steps between an unsigned contract and a won opportunity.
E-Signatures Are Fast...Really Fast
This may be one of the most obvious benefits of using e-signatures, but it has to go first because it’s also one of the biggest. E-signatures exponentially speed up the signing process.
Without e-signatures, you could be in for days of waiting for executed contracts as individuals print, sign, and scan them back into the computer. What’s worse, some may not even have access to a printer when they receive your documents, meaning they’ll be put out of mind until they’re able to sign them (which might not be for a few days!). And don’t even get us started on missing signatures...
Not only is this extremely slow, it’s a frustrating and negative experience for the people you’re trying to impress.
E-signature solutions remove all of this frustration. For one, e-signature requests can be sent to the appropriate people in seconds. The right solutions will merge any Salesforce data you need into your contract automatically, meaning that once your prospect is ready to sign, sending the contract is a simple button click away (and you can give your Ctrl+C keys a rest for once). Native solutions like S-Sign will run even faster, since they process everything directly inside of Salesforce.
Once the agreement is sent, stakeholders can sign it immediately -- no printing or scanning involved. An easier signature process means a higher conversion rate. There’s less of a chance of the email getting opened and forgotten -- your call to immediate action will invite them to sign right away.
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E-Signatures Are Great On Mobile
Let’s face it -- clocking 40 hours in the office each week is slowly becoming a thing of the past as more and more companies take advantage of remote work. Just look at this list of jobs that can be done entirely on your phone! With this comes the demand for solutions that enable business processes to work from quite literally anywhere.
The odds are pretty good that your prospect won’t be sitting in a fully-functioning office (with a printer or fax machine) and staring at their inbox when your contract comes through. This isn’t a problem if you’re using e-signatures.
It doesn’t matter if they’re in the grocery store, the airport, or climbing a mountain -- as soon as your prospect receives your signature request, they can review and sign it on their phone or tablet. And this doesn’t just go for your prospects -- e-signature solutions give you the flexibility of sending documents for signature from anywhere, too.
E-Signatures Optimize Your Workflow
You probably don’t exclusively speak to one person per company during the sales process. In fact, an average of 7-8 people are actively involved in the buying process, with 5-6 additional people participating occasionally. At the end of the sales cycle, there’ll be quite a bit to keep track of.
E-signatures optimize your workflow to take the stress out of closing deals. They can be set up to do things like automatically email a quote to all of an opportunity’s contacts when you update the stage to Proposal/Price Quote, ensuring no stakeholder is forgotten. In addition, they’re easier to use for everyone involved: no email attachments are being sent back and forth, meaning everybody can always be sure they’re working on the same version of a document. This also means that if there is a mistake after sending out your contract, it can be easily voided and re-sent in seconds after the error is corrected. Your deals will close faster and less time will be wasted on all sides.
E-Signatures Allow For Data-Driven Decisions
When you email a contract out through Salesforce, you’ll be able to see when the email was opened, but after that you’re pretty much in the dark. You’ll have no idea how long it took for your prospect to sign the document, or how much time it spent with individual stakeholders.
With e-signature solutions, you can see exactly when each person opened and signed your document, and how long it took to get passed on to others. S-Docs and S-Sign make it easy to access all of this information directly from the records you're working with. Once you’ve collected enough data, you can make it work for you by adjusting things like your call-to-action, verbiage, and the time of day or day of week that you send your documents. E-signature solutions allow you to stop leaving this valuable data on the table and start making it work for you.
Having access to this data also enables you to ensure your document has been signed by all relevant parties, and that no signature has been left out.
E-Signatures Create Urgency With Expiration Dates
Creating a sense of urgency is the goal of any salesperson waiting for a signature - the faster the deal is signed, the faster payment can be made, and the faster the client can get up and running. However, words can only get you so far -- in the end, an emailed PDF can sit with your prospect for as long as they like.
To avoid this sales “black hole,” you can use an e-signature solution to set a real expiration date for the signature request that’s easily viewed by anyone looking at the document. If your prospect knows that they only have a limited amount of time before the document is automatically voided, they’ll be much more likely to sign it or pass it on to the appropriate stakeholders as soon as they can. Expiration dates are a great way to speed up the already-quick process.
E-Signatures Keep You Top-of-Mind With Reminders
Reminder emails are another great way to ensure the reviewal and signature process is moving along at a steady pace. E-signature solutions let you automate how often reminder emails are sent based on different factors during the signing process. Great e-signature solutions like S-Docs and S-Sign also let you customize these emails in any way you’d like, including pulling data directly from Salesforce and conditionally rendering certain portions of the email. This helps ensure that your emails are relevant, well-designed, on-brand, and that they show up in your prospect’s inbox at exactly the right time.
E-Signatures Help With Design
Although it may seem like an afterthought, the importance of document design cannot be overstated. Bad design will make your company look unprofessional and sloppy, and won’t necessarily inspire confidence in the solutions you’re offering. Good design, on the other hand, will show your prospect that you’re serious about the deal, living in the modern world, and a business that can be trusted.
Good e-signature solutions don’t just let you place signature tags on a page and send it out -- they allow you to design your document in accordance with your company’s brand guidelines, keeping everything on-brand and professional. When you use S-Docs and S-Sign, you can built these sophisticated documents directly within Salesforce, or upload any pre-designed PDF to drag and drop signature tags. Once you have some templates built out, they’ll always be ready to go at a moment’s notice. These templates will also keep you from making any copy mistakes.
E-Signatures Increase Productivity
The fact of the matter is that e-signatures simplify just about every aspect of the signature process that would normally sap productivity and kill sales momentum. Valuable time spent hunting down prices, company information, names and job titles? E-signature solutions pull data from Salesforce and automate all of it. Jumping between programs to build a great-looking proposal? E-signature solutions can use sophisticated, pre-designed templates. Crafting the perfect reminder email over and over? E-signature solutions automatically do it for you.
Great e-signature solutions can even cut down on your data-entry time, since they will write your signers’ responses directly back to Salesforce fields.
Simply put, e-signatures allow you to focus on the highest value work. In the long run, you’ll spend more time selling, nurturing leads, and building relationships, and because of the efficiency that your e-signature solution provides, more time converting prospects into customers.
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E-Signatures Are Incredibly Secure
E-signatures have been a legal form of signature in the United States for a long time -- since the ESIGN Act was signed into law in 2000, in fact. Despite their relatively long history, however, it’s taken businesses quite a long time to start adopting and using them regularly, usually out of security-related concerns. Ironically, adopting an e-signature solution is one of the most security-conscious decisions a business can make.
While it’s true that wet-ink signatures are unique in the fact that everybody’s handwriting is different, their security stops there. After a physical document is signed, it’s impossible to tell any more information about it -- when and where it was signed, how long ago, and whether or not the document was edited after signing occurred.
Electronic signatures are secure because they track this process information, then attach it to an audit trail after a document is executed. You’ll be able to see when a document was accessed, how many times it was opened, who signed it and when, as well as IP addresses from where it was signed. If the document was edited, that information will be available too. It’s much easier to detect fraud or defend a contract’s legality when this information is available.
E-signatures also help you minimize risk by ensuring compliance with your business’s policies -- you control what parts of a document are allowed to be edited, and which documents are able to be sent out. You can also run your Salesforce validation rules on your contracts, guaranteeing that they’re filled out correctly.
If you’re using Salesforce native e-signature applications, like S-Docs with S-Sign, this security is taken to the next level. Native apps are built on the Salesforce platform, meaning they’re housed entirely within Salesforce, and comply with all of Salesforce’s stringent security requirements by default. If you’re already using Salesforce, native apps conform to your org’s individual security settings and sharing rules, and they don’t take your data outside of Salesforce for processing. You don’t have to vet different cloud services when you’re combining Salesforce with a native e-signature app, because contracts can be created, sent, tracked, and signed directly within Salesforce.
E-Signatures Are Good For Your Brand
E-signature solutions aren’t going anywhere, and they’re only going to get more common over time. If you’re not using them now, you’re falling behind your competitors.
In a nutshell, they’re the modern way of doing business, and other businesses will form a positive impression of you and your brand the moment they see that sleek signature pad and realize they don’t have to dust off their printer. That positive first impression will likely translate into more positive experiences down the road, and even a higher chance of getting referrals.
Additionally, e-signatures are great for the environment. Using e-signature solutions could mean saving thousands of trees worth of paper each year (and likely thousands of dollars as well). Eco-friendly solutions are always a plus for your image!
It Only Takes A Few Minutes To Get Started
The benefits of e-signature solutions for Salesforce go on and on -- there are countless ways they can strengthen security, increase conversion rates and skyrocket productivity. If you don’t use e-signatures yet, you’re probably missing out on a lot of these advantages, but the good news is it only takes a few minutes to get started. And if you’re using Salesforce, it may take even less.
S-Sign, built by S-Docs, is a 100% native e-signature solution that’s purpose-built for Salesforce customers. S-Sign is built to complement our industry-leading document generation solution, S-Docs, meaning creating your documents, sending them for signature, and tracking everything in Salesforce is a seamless process. Since they're built on the Salesforce platform, S-Sign and S-Docs require almost no integration or setup, and mirror the look and feel of Salesforce. This means that you can start streamlining your signature processes immediately.
It also means you can be completely confident in the security of your signatures -- since they're native to Salesforce, S-Sign and S-Docs allow you to build contracts, proposals, or other documents, send them for signature, and have them signed directly within Salesforce.
Now that you know the benefits, what are you waiting for? To learn more about S-Sign’s great features, including signing in person, automation, and validation rules, contact the S-Docs sales team today at sales@sdocs.com or request a demo today.
Happy signing (and closing)!
